A flurry of recent studies indicates that candidates who simply look more capable or attractive are more likely to win elections. In this article, we investigate whether voters' snap judgments of appearance travel across cultures and whether they influence elections in new democracies. We show unlabeled, black-and-white pictures of Mexican and Brazilian candidates' faces to subjects living in America and India, asking them which candidates would be better elected officials. Despite cultural, ethnic, and racial differences, Americans and Indians agree about which candidates are superficially appealing (correlations ranging from .70 to .87). Moreover, these superficial judgments appear to have a profound influence on Mexican and Brazilian voters, as the American and Indian judgments predict actual election returns with surprising accuracy. We still find, however, a role for more traditional institutional variables, as the magnitude of the appearance effects may depend on the rules of the electoral game.

Despite wavy national economies and a perception among observers that economic globalization is growing increasingly unpopular, aggregate support for free trade remains quite high across Latin America. This finding is robust to the wording of survey questions and has been quite resilient through time, even in the face of economic stagnation. Current theories of trade preferences, including the widely applied Heckscher-Ohlin model, do not explain this trend. Instead, the author proposes a theory of trade preferences based not on what citizens produce but on what they consume. Statistical analyses of different surveys, including one conducted in fourteen Latin American countries, demonstrate that a consumption-based approach best accounts for trade preferences across individuals and countries. Moreover, the theory provides an explanation for the overall popularity of free trade in Latin America: citizens recognize and appreciate the lower price, increased variety, and higher quality of goods that have come in the wake of trade liberalization.

Although the allure of consumption is the engine of globalization, political economists have tended to ignore varying consumer tastes as a potential source of beliefs about trade policy. This article develops a theory of trade policy preferences that adds the notion of varying consumer tastes to the standard labor-market application of the Heckscher-Ohlin trade model. The theory, which can explain trade preferences both across individuals and countries, is supported by an empirical analysis of survey data from 41 nations. Heavy consumers of exportables are found to be more protectionist than heavy consumers of imports and import-competing goods. Moreover, citizens in countries with expensive tradable goods see trade liberalization as a remedy to the rents they pay for protectionism. Other findings also support the more conventional labor-market side of the Heckscher-Ohlin model.

The rise of the left across Latin America is one of the most striking electoral events to occur in new democracies during the last decade. Current work argues either that the left's electoral success stems from a thoroughgoing rejection of free-market policies by voters or that electorates have sought to punish poorly performing right-wing incumbents. Whether the new left has a policy or performance mandate has implications for the type of policies it may pursue in power and the voting behavior of Latin American electorates. Using a new measure of voter ideology called vote-revealed leftism (VRL) and a time-series cross-sectional analysis of aggregate public opinion indicators generated from mass surveys of eighteen countries over thirteen years, the authors show that the left has a clear economic policy mandate but that this mandate is much more moderate than many observers might expect. In contrast to the generalized view that new democracies are of low quality, the authors reach the more optimistic conclusion that wellreasoned voting on economic policy issues and electoral mandates are now relevant features of politics in Latin America.

T hat democracy is unthinkable without political parties is now conventional wisdom in political science. One of the necessary functions parties fulfill is to simplify the labyrinthine world of politics by supplying voters with relevant information in digestible form. In stable democracies parties facilitate electoral decision making by providing the informational shortcuts and standing choices that many citizens rely upon at the start of every campaign (Popkin 1991;Sniderman 2000). While this makes reasoned choice easier for "informationmising" voters, it also lends an air of predictability and even inevitability to most elections in stable party systems. Because campaign effects tend to be limited or offsetting, outcomes can often be forecast before campaigning even begins (Campbell and Garand 2000;Gelman and King 1993).When party systems are young and/or in flux, however, parties commonly have a more limited presence in the electorate (Converse 1969). Partisan attachments Andy Baker is assistant professor of political science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115-5000 (a.baker@neu.edu). Barry Ames is Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (barryames@yahoo.com). Lucio R. Renno is assistant professor, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 (lucio renno@yahoo.com).Thanks to Jorge Dominguez, Kenneth Greene, Robert Huckfeldt, Chappell Lawson, William Mayer, Mauro Porto, David Samuels, Ethan Scheiner, Katherine Cramer Walsh, members of the Latin American Seminar Series at Harvard University, and the Political Science Department at the University of California-Davis for valuable comments and assistance. The data collection for this project was funded by the National Science Foundation (SES #0137088).are only weakly formed, so voter preferences are more volatile, campaigns more crucial, and election outcomes less predictable (Lawson and McCann 2005). Though this combination-weak partisan cues, low levels of partisan identification, and volatile voters-characterizes many new democracies, scholars have only begun to study how citizens in such contexts gather political information and make electoral decisions. We address this question with a unique public opinion dataset collected during a particularly volatile campaign, the presidential election of 2002 in Brazil. Our central claim is that politically colored information gathered by citizens through social networks plays a primary role in short-term attitude change and vote choice. We explain how interpersonal influence produces short-term preference volatility among voters and shapes election outcomes. Our analysis also contributes to the heretofore U.S.-dominated social network literature by clarifying some of its conceptual and theoretical ambiguities and by pointing out causal mechanisms that